"...difficile est saturam non scribere. Nam quis iniquae
tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus, ut teneat se..."
"...it is hard not to write Satire. For who is so tolerant of the unjust City, so steeled, that he can restrain himself... Juvenal, The Satires (1.30-32)
akakyakakyevich@gmail.com

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Results and how to deal with them

It is wintertime, and the fish are not
jumping—fish being entirely too sensible to that sort of thing at this time of
year—the cotton is not high, although I am sure there are many who would
disagree with me; there is a certain countercultural quality to cotton that one
does not associate with such bourgeois fabrics as nylon or burlap; and Hillary
Clinton is not the President-elect of this our Great Republic, which has the
snowflakes in a bit of a tizzy.They are
blocking the streets, as snowflakes are wont to do, and they are refusing to
acknowledge the results of the late election and demanding that the Electoral
College refuse to elect Mr. Trump. The snowflakes are quite vociferous with
their demands and have even taken to smashing windows in Oregon and playing
with Play-Doh and petting therapy dogs to get their way. Now, I believe that
there is nothing wrong with refusing to acknowledge reality; I have done it
myself on more than one occasion. I remember the 2004 American League
Championship Series, for example, where I could not make myself believe that
the Yankees had blown a three game lead to the Red Sox and then spent much of
2005 refusing to believe that such a thing had actually occurred (I’m still not
sure I believe it entirely, but I have stopped screaming at people who tell me
that Boston won that year. Time heals all wounds…almost).And I have spent the better part of forty
years refusing to acknowledge that I could really stand to lose about thirty
pounds, and I will thank you not to remind me of the fact, but the thing of it
is this: I haven’t rioted in the streets because I didn’t get my way. I didn’t
break any windows, I didn’t set fire to anything, I understood that life would
go on.

I understood this in 2004, and I understand this
now, because I know that there is something called objective reality. Objective
reality, for the vast numbers of people who have apparently never heard of it,
is that which exists independent of oneself.There is such a thing, despite the best efforts of French philosophers
to convince us all otherwise. Asia, for example, is there whether or not I have
ever seen it myself or been there to affirm its existence. Asia does not need
my affirmation in order to exist and the billions of people who live there do
not care whether or not I accept the concept of Asia at all. Asia just is and
my refusal to accept Asia’s existence does not change the fact that Asia is
still there.

Similarly, in the United States there is an
institution called the Electoral College. It is an excellent institution—the menu
could use some updating, though—and as venerable as few things are in this
country that worships change, and it exists to elect the President of the
United States and to give local political hacks a chance to go up to the state
capitol for a couple of days and chase girls and get drunk on the taxpayer’s
dime.Recently, however, Mrs. Clinton
failed to matriculate at this august institution and Mr. Trump did. That is a
fact. That is objective reality, which is not wildly popular with snowflakes
this year. For the snowflakes, this reality must, absolutely must, change. For
them, the idea that Hillary Clinton is not going to be the next President of
the United States is too horrible to contemplate and therefore this must change…because
they said so.That their ideas for how
this happy outcome should occur are whimsical to the point of tweeness does not
seem to bother the snowflakes, for no one has ever refused them before and they
have no intention of permitting a precedent to start now. The snowflakes
suggest, for example, that the electors of the Electoral College not vote for
Mr. Trump, and have begun a campaign of pleading and only vaguely disguised
arm-twisting to get the electors to change their votes. Yet others are
suggesting that the voting machines in at least three states were in some way
interfered with and that the results should be thrown out. I am sure that there
are probably even more fanciful notions abounding in the dim alleyways of the
East and West Coasts, but all of these notions have one problem: objective
reality.Did Mrs. Clinton win the popular
vote? She probably did, and what does that have to do with the price of tea in
China? The Electoral College elects American presidents and has ever since the
first presidential election in 1788. Having the popular majority is nice, but
it is not the point of the exercise. I would venture to say that if Mrs.
Clinton had the electoral votes and Mr. Trump had the popular vote, these very
same snowflakes would be singing the praises of the Framers and how wonderfully
clever they were, even if they were dead white misogynistic racist
bastards.History records any number of
faithless electors; there was once a mass defection of twenty-three, I think it
was, from the Virginia delegation, said electors objecting to the Vice
President-elect’s public relationship with a slave mistress.This only happened once and I do not believe
it will happen again, slavery having gone the way of all flesh. As for the claims
that someone interfered with the voting in three states, Carl Sagan once
pointed out that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I do not
believe, based on what we know now, that such proof is forthcoming. No, I think
that the snowflakes will have to live with a President Trump, although I will
admit that maybe something will come of this faithless elector thing; it is
2016, after all, and the Chicago Cubs did win the World Series, so maybe the
impossible can happen here.One never
knows, do one, as Fats Waller used to say.